A Little Princess _ Being the whole story - Frances Hodgson Burnett

window-seat, she walked over to her and spoke. She only said the kind of thing
little girls always say to each other by way of beginning an acquaintance, but
there was something friendly about Sara, and people always felt it.

"What   is  your    name?"  she said.

To explain Miss St. John's amazement one must recall that a new pupil is, for
a short time, a somewhat uncertain thing; and of this new pupil the entire school
had talked the night before until it fell asleep quite exhausted by excitement and
contradictory stories. A new pupil with a carriage and a pony and a maid, and a
voyage from India to discuss, was not an ordinary acquaintance.

"My name's  Ermengarde  St. John,"  she answered.

"Mine is Sara Crewe," said Sara. "Yours is very pretty. It sounds like a story
book."

"Do you like    it?"    fluttered   Ermengarde. "I—I    like    yours."

Miss St. John's chief trouble in life was that she had a clever father.
Sometimes this seemed to her a dreadful calamity. If you have a father who
knows everything, who speaks seven or eight languages, and has thousands of
volumes which he has apparently learned by heart, he frequently expects you to
be familiar with the contents of your lesson books at least; and it is not
improbable that he will feel you ought to be able to remember a few incidents of
history and to write a French exercise. Ermengarde was a severe trial to Mr. St.
John. He could not understand how a child of his could be a notably and
unmistakably dull creature who never shone in anything.

"Good heavens!" he had said more than once, as he stared at her, "there are
times when I think she is as stupid as her Aunt Eliza!"

If her Aunt Eliza had been slow to learn and quick to forget a thing entirely
when she had learned it, Ermengarde was strikingly like her. She was the
monumental dunce of the school, and it could not be denied.

"She    must    be  MADE    to  learn," her father  said    to  Miss    Minchin.

Consequently Ermengarde spent the greater part of her life in disgrace or in
tears. She learned things and forgot them; or, if she remembered them, she did